Keepsake (29 page)

Her mother grabbed her by the shoulders. Swaths of emotion were splashed across the tawny skin of her cheeks. Above her burning cheekbones, her dark eyebrows, heavier than was strictly fashionable, were pulled down in pain. Her look was as tortured, and as fierce, as the grip she had on her daughter.

"If you go," she said in a choked and agonized voice, "then don't bother coming back to tell me.
Ever!"

Olivia blinked. "You don't mean that, Mom," she said, amazed and almost annoyed by her mother's melodramatic tone. "You're just saying that."

"I do mean it!" Teresa Bennett cried, and she burst into sobs. Tears rolled over her cheeks as she said over and over between hiccups of pain, "Don't, honey
... don't
... please don't
..."

Now it was Olivia's turn to stare. Her mother had always been emotional—but this! She had always been kind to poor Aunt Betty—but this!

"Mom, it's no big deal," Olivia said, engulfing her mother as if she were a five-year-old with a scraped knee.
 
"You're getting way too upset for Aunt Betty's sake, honestly."

Her mother would not be consoled. Finally, in wonder and exasperation at her hysterics, Olivia stepped back and blurted out, "I have to do this, Mom! I love him!"

"You don't love him!" her mother shrieked, slapping Olivia's shoulder in her frustration. "You only think you do! You just want to fly in the face of your father! This is all about getting back at your father, Olivia, and nothing else!"

"But I do love Quinn!" Olivia cried, stunned by her mother's response. "My God—how can you say I don't love him? How can you possibly know how I feel?"

"You've never had time to love any man! They're annoyances to you, distractions from your career. Why would you suddenly think you love this one, unless it were to hurt us all?"

Olivia's purse had slid down to her wrist. Frustrated and infuriated, she looped the strap around her hand and slammed the bag in a vicious arc onto a counter. "Damn it! No matter what I do, it's not good enough for you! Dad wouldn't let me work at the mill. Now you won't let me love Quinn. What does it take around here?
You're
the one who always told me to follow my heart.
You
're
the one who always told me to make my own dreams happen. Well, that's what I'm doing! I love him, Mother!
I love Quinn."

Three little words. They silenced as efficiently as a sword plunged directly through the heart.

Teresa Bennett became very still. Without another word, she moved away from her daughter and slipped back onto the woven seat of the wrought
-iron chair at her new marble-
topped island. Without another word, she moved her cup and saucer carefully to one side, then folded her arms in front of her on the stone. Without another word, she bowed her head and pressed her brow against the soft ivory cashmere cocooning her arms.

Olivia stared at her mother for a long moment. And then she left, without another word.

Quinn went directly from the hospital to the police station and told Vickers where he could find the weapon that was used on Mrs. Dewsbury.

The chief laughed in his face. "You're completely paranoid, you know that? Too many years brooding in exile, if you ask me."

"Get a warrant," Quinn said. "Go to his house. Hell, stop by for a beer. You're a pal of his. Check the place out for yourself."

"I
am
a pal, Leary," he growled, "which isn't the only reason I'm telling you to get the hell out of my office. You've given me no cause to search the man's home. A dirty look on New Year's Eve and some psychological claptrap about—what?—sour grapes or something? That don't qualify as cause. Stop wasting my time. I'm late for a meeting already."

And that was that.

Seething, Quinn decided to retrieve the weapon himself. Maybe Vickers would call and warn his old friend, but maybe he wouldn't have the chance. It was worth a shot.

Quinn left his truck parked at the end of the block and headed for the bland little bungalow where Coach Bronsky had lived alone all of his life. He found it at the middle o
f a tree-lined street, looking—
like its owner—saggier, baggier, somehow more mean.

A beat-up truck sat parked next to the house. As Quinn suspected, Bronsky was home. It was the lunch period at Keepsake High. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where a boozing coach who lived nearby would spend the free time.

The house itself presented a surly facade. The shades of the four windows that faced the street were pulled completely down, just the way they used to be. One of them had a big rip near the roller. For all Quinn knew, it was the same torn shade that had hung there two decades ago.

Even then, Coach Bronsky used to scare the kids. Not scare, exactly; more like thrill them. He was tough and mean and called them unspeakably insulting names, and underneath all their terror, they loved it. He was a role model for them, mostly because no one had a father with a repertoire of insults as vast as his. But the allure wore thin by sophomore year, and by their senior year, most of the guys despised him.

The coach was a bully and a browbeater, a grown-up version of the kind of boy who pulled wings off insects in the name of science. He had a meanness of spirit, a pettiness of emotion. He blamed everyone for everything. Quinn could not remember a single instance when Coach Bronsky admitted to a mistake or said he was sorry. He intimidated the younger kids with his size and the older ones with his authority. Single women shunned him. Mothers resented him. Fathers felt guilty that he had charge of their sons.

He was a thug.

A
beware of dog
sign, rusted and hanging from only one of its holes, was wired to the chest-high chain-link fence. Quinn opened the gate without bewaring. The dog was dead, Quinn had no doubt
;
he knew where the bones were.

Quinn walked up the five cracked concrete steps. Ignoring the bell, which was missing its button, he knocked and then waited. Three rectangles of glass in the door, stepping down from upper left to lower ri
ght, had been shaded with blue-
lined pages of looseleaf paper, and one of the sheets had been pried from its tape to make a peephole. At six-foot-three, Quinn was able to see through the hole into the house.

The view inside was dismal: an end table piled high with magazines and dirty dishes and topped with a ceramic lamp whose shade was akilter. A dirt-colored couch with lumpy, torn cushions. A carpet that was matted and gray and littered with bits of food and scraps of paper. And over everything, a pall of grime and grease, rage and despair.

Quinn stepped out of view through the pulled-away sheet in the window. Eventually the door swung open a few inches. The smell of whiskey—bourbon, Quinn assumed—added one more layer of sourness in the air between Bronsky and him.

"What do
you
want?"

"A word," said Quinn, slamming the door clear of the coach's grip. It hit the wall with a bounce as Quinn pushed his way inside and grabbed the coach by the throat with one hand, pinning him against the stairwell as he kicked the door shut behind them.

The warm, flabby flesh of the coach's neck felt irresistible to Quinn. He got a death grip on the man's windpipe, then loosened his hold just enough for the coach's head to slump back into position on his shoulders. Before the coach could catch his breath, Quinn tightened his grip and slammed him back into the wall again. This time he squeezed harder.

Bronsky's round face turned florid; his eyes were no more than slits above puffy bags and a foul-smel
ling mouth-
hole gaping for air. Just before the coach passed out, Quinn relaxed his hold on his throat, then tightened it and slammed him up against the wall another time.

Bronsky couldn't speak, and Quinn didn't want him to. Not yet. Quinn positively needed these dribs and drabs of release; the alternative would have been to kill his old coach with a single blow. He eased his grip just enough for a trickle of air to flow down Bronsky's throat. The gurgling sound he made, so like a death rattle, was deeply satisfying to Quinn's ears.

"Listen to me, you sorry sonofabitch," Quinn said, his face within inches of the loathsome one he knew so well. "You want to knock out little old ladies, you ask me first.
 
You want to terrorize single women, you ask me first. You want to panic a bunch of churchgoers, you ask me first. Got that?"

The coach was in no position either to shake or to nod his head. He squawked what sounded like a denial. It infuriated Quinn. He slammed the man's head against the wall again. This time the answer he got was more to his liking.

"Ayight... ayight."

Quinn let him go. "Where's the trophy you stole from the box in Mrs. Dewsbury's front room?"

Coughing and sucking in air as he massaged his throat, the coach croaked, "I don't... have any trophy."

"The hell you don't," said Quinn, sending the coach stumbling before him with a shove to his back. He scanned the living room, then said, "Where's your bedroom?"

Since the c
oach looked like a man who didn't climb steps if he didn't have to, Quinn looked for and found a sleeping hovel on the first floor. It was at the end of the hall, next to the kitchen. He shoved Bronsky into the room and flipped on a light. The tiny bedroom smelled rank, a stale mix of booze and b.o. Quinn glanced around and saw the stolen trophy—a brass-plated football mounted on a wood base—sitting on a dresser whose drawers were hanging half out. He pulled a hanky from his hip pocket and used it to pick up the football by its stem. If the weapon still had fingerprints, it would have forensic traces of Mrs. Dewsbury as well.

The coach glared at him. He looked almost indignant. "You're going to jail for this."

Quinn snorted. "I don't think so. Not unless I follow through on the yen I have to bash in your head with this thing. And even there, I'm pretty sure the town would thank me."

He walked past the coach out of the room, but then turned back for one last warning. "If I ever hear of another attempt by you to frighten someone—if you so much as whisper an unsettling word in anyone's ear—then I'll hunt you down and kill you. You know me well, Coach. You know I will. Are you sober enough to understand me?"

The coach's glare of defiance quickly turned sullen. He let his gaze slither away from Quinn and hide in some laundry lying on the floor.

"Yeah, I get it."

Quinn muttered, "You asshole."

As he walked out of the foul-smelling house with his recovered trophy, Quinn glanced through the broken blinds of a filthy window that looked out on a small, overgrown yard. It didn't surprise him to see a mound of soil piled next to a dug-up hole in the ground.

Poor dog. His mortal remains were now in a plastic bag lying somewhere in the town dump. God only knows what kind of life and death the animal had suffered as the pet of this brute.

All things considered, Quinn figured the dog was better off in the landfill.

****

It was a fact that Coach Bronsky had an alibi for the time of Alison's murder—it was an unacceptable fact, but an undeniable one. Quinn would gladly have given all the money he possessed to prove that Coach had done the deed, but everyone knew that he and then-Sergeant Vickers had played poker with two other buddies all night long.

Besides, Bronsky had never been linked, even as tenuously as Quinn's father had, to Alison Bennett. No gossip, no anecdotes,
nada.
Quinn's old coach might have been a scumbag, but apparently he wasn't a murdering scumbag—although he'd just come damned close with Mrs. Dewsbury.

In the meantime, Quinn was approaching the house of Olivia's uncle with dread. His mind had locked onto three scenarios, all of them involving Bennetts. In one of them, Rupert Bennett impregnated his daughter and later murdered her. In another,
Rand
got her pregnant and Rupert murdered her. In the third,
Rand
did both. It was like juggling three hand grenades with the pins pulled out.

The house where Rupert Bennett lived, like his brother Owen's, was not visible from the road, but that was all that the two houses had in common. Rupert lived in a simple saltbox Colonial that dated from maybe the early 1800s. It had a classic, uncluttered look to it that appealed to Quinn; if he were to settle down in the east, such a house would be his choice.

It was built on a clea
ring in the middle of a second-
growth forest. Someone had once farmed the land, but not for a generation or two. It wasn't hard to see the writing on the wall. The land around the house would be sold off, if it hadn't been already, for a shot of income. Evidence of poverty—more likely, of a money-sucking habit—was staring Quinn in the face. Rupert's house was as shabby as his brother's mansion was pristine.

Simply put, the Colonial structure was falling down in place. The roof was sagging, shingles were missing, the leaky wood gutters were doing much more harm than good. The windows needed glazing, the foundation needed tucking, and as for the sills... Quinn could almost hear the powder-post beetles munching away as he drove up. The craftsman in Quinn wanted to buy out the Bennetts then and there and save the house, but that was not why he had come.